How quickly do analogue insulins act?

Long acting insulin takes about 2 hours to start acting, and is designed to act uniformly so that there is no peak activity as such. The duration of long acting insulin is up to 24 hours. Your healthcare team will be able to advise whether you need one or two doses per day.

Benefits of analogue insulin

The primary benefits of analogue insulin are that the rapid acting insulin works as soon as it is injected and long acting insulins have no peak activity.

Rapid acting insulin is particularly useful for people who are insulin dependent as it can help to minimise sharp rises (spikes) in blood sugar shortly after eating.

Long acting analogue insulins have become popular partly because the lack of a peak activity period allows for easier prediction of how it acts and has also gives some people more confidence that they will avoid night time hypos

Disadvantages of analogue insulin

As with human insulins, it has been reported that analogue insulins may lead to unwanted side effects such as loss of hypo awareness, lethargy and weight gain that might not be found when taking animal insulins.

To date, no conclusive research to confirm or deny this claim is available. Analogue insulins are still a relatively new treatment and therefore there is a lack of long term research. In 2009, a four country study highlighted a potential link between the use of Lantus and the development of cancer

However, after the research was reviewed, the European Medicines Agency found the studies to not be consistent enough to either confirm or deny the link, and therefore cleared Lantus as being safe for use.

Price of analogue insulin

A further disadvantage of analogue insulin is in its price. Analogue insulins cost the NHS over twice as much as non-analogue human insulins.